// Workers AI · dad joke modeWho's Mikołaj Kruszewski? A Polish linguist who krushed it.

Mikołaj Habdank Kruszewski
Born	(1851-12-18)December 18, 1851 Łuck, Russian Empire
Died	November 12, 1887(1887-11-12) (aged 35) Kazan, Russian Empire
Other name	Nikolay Vyacheslavovich Krushevsky
Occupation	Linguist
Known for	First synchronic definition of the phoneme
Academic background
Education	University of Warsaw (MA) Kazan University (MA, PhD)
Thesis	Outline of Linguistic Science (1883)
Doctoral advisor	Jan Baudouin de Courtenay
Academic work
Discipline	Linguistics
Sub-discipline	Historical linguistics, phonology
Institutions	Kazan University

Mikołaj Habdank Kruszewski (18 December 1851 – 12 November 1887) was a Polish linguist active in the Russian Empire. Kruszewski was a student and colleague of Jan Baudouin de Courtenay at Kazan University, where they developed the Kazan school of linguistics. At Kazan, Kruszewski developed his theory of alternations and jointly invented the modern concept of the phoneme with Baudouin de Courtenay. After publishing his doctoral dissertation Outline of Linguistic Science in 1883, he succeeded Baudouin de Courtenay as professor and Chair of Indo-European at Kazan University.

In 1884, Kruszewski became ill of a neurodegenerative disease, which resulted in his death in 1887 at the age of 35. With the exception of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, Kruszewski's work remained obscure until the late 20th century.

Early life and education

Kruszewski's coat of arms

Mikołaj Habdank Kruszewski was born on December 18, 1851 in Łuck, Volhynia, in present-day Ukraine. His father, Wacław Kruszewski, came from a szlachta (Polish noble) family, and bore the Abdank coat of arms. Wacław began his career as a military officer in the uhlan regiments of Congress Poland, participating in the November Uprising of 1831. He later entered the civil service, serving as governor of various towns in the Volyn Governorate, including Ostroh, Ovruch, Lutsk (where Mikołaj was born), and Kovel. Mikołaj Kruszewski's mother, Rozalia Ignatiivna Kruszewska (née Notken), came from a German merchant family. Wacław and Rozalia Kruszewski had five children, of which Mikołaj was the eldest. Mikołaj had three brothers, Wincenty-Eliasz, Klemens, and Aleksander-Albert, and a sister, Maria. Mikołaj was named after St. Nicholas, the patron saint of Lutsk.

In 1862, Kruszewski started his primary education at Lutsk District Noble School. During this period, Kruszewski moved between a rented residence in Lutsk and his mother's estate in Solotvyn, where his family had moved to after his father's retirement. In Solotvyn, Kruszewski acquired the Ukrainian language and learned about Ukrainian folklore, which he would go on to academically study.

In 1866, Kruszewski continued his studies at the Greek-Uniate gymnasium in Chełm. In 1871, Kruszewski passed examinations in Latin, Greek, Russian, and general and Russian history and was admitted into the Faculty of History and Philology at the University of Warsaw. He took an interest in analytic philosophy under the influence of the Russian philosopher Matvey Troitsky In 1875, Kruszewski graduated from the University of Warsaw; his graduation thesis, "Incantations as a genre of Russian folk poetry", was published in the university's journal in the following year.

Career

At Warsaw, the Slavist Mitrofan Kolosov suggested that Kruszewski should pursue graduate study either under Alexander Potebnja in Kharkiv or under Jan Baudouin de Courtenay in Kazan. Kruszewski chose Baudouin, likely because Baudouin was also Polish and had also studied at Warsaw as an undergraduate. In the summer of 1875, Kruszewski applied for admission as a graduate student at Kazan University, but was unsuccessful. However, Nikolay Mikhailovich Blagoveshchensky, then rector of the University of Warsaw, helped Kruszewski find a job as a teacher of classical languages in the town of Troitsk, near Orenburg.

Kruszewski taught in Troitsk between 1875 and 1878, during which he kept correspondence with Baudouin, studying Indo-European linguistics and Sanskrit under his guidance. By 1878, Kruszewski had saved up enough money to afford graduate study at Kazan without requiring a stipend from the university, which in 1875 Kruszewski was unable to obtain from either Kazan or Warsaw. Kruszewski was appointed to the position of "candidate for a faculty position without a professorial fellowship", which the linguist Joanna Radwańska-Williams described as "enter[ing] the system through the back door by the force of his own determination".

Upon arriving in Kazan, Kruszewski became Baudouin's closest student. Although Baudouin was known for being unusual in advocating for his students' careers, he was especially in active in his efforts to accelerate Kruszewski's linguistic career on account Kruszewski's ambitions and financial situation. In addition to the Sanskrit and Indo-European material required by the university, Baudouin organized private lessons for Kruszewski in his own home, spending between eight to ten hours per week on topics including readings of the Rigveda and Lithuanian folktales, exercises in Slavic dialectology, and discussion of contemporary works in linguistics. These sessions soon grew into what is now known as the Kazan Linguistic Circle, attracting many of Baudouin's other students and even the Turkologist Wilhelm Radloff, who already held an administrative position at Kazan. Baudouin also secured a scholarship for Kruszewski for his second year at Kazan.

Over his first academic year, Kruszewski focused his studies on Sanskrit and Indo-European, publishing translations of several hymns from the Rigveda into Russian. He decided to study Sanskrit verbs as the subject of his master's thesis. In 1879, Kruszewski produced a short article from his study of Sanskrit verbs titled "Observations on certain phonetic phenomena connected with accentuation". He submitted the paper as qualification for a position as a salaried lecturer (privat-docent), which he obtained in the following year, teaching phonetics and Sanskrit.

In 1880, Kruszewski came upon Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure's Mémoire on the Proto-Indo-European vowel system, which had been published in 1879. Saussure's Mémoire accounted for the previously inexplicable inconsistent correspondence between the vowel a in Sanskrit and the vowels e, o, and a in other Indo-European languages, among other problems. Kruszewski wrote a review of Saussure's Mémoire praising its analysis and novel methodology. Thus, he considered the problem of Indo-European vowels solved and changed the topic of his master's thesis to applying Saussure's reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European vowels to the study of Old Church Slavonic. In May 1881, Kruszewski defended his master's thesis, "On the question of the 'guna'". Baudouin praised the thesis in presenting Kruszewski to the department as a candidate for the position of docent, saying that it "sheds completely new light on many linguistic phenomena" and that "in the Russian scientific literature until now there was nothing like it".

Although the linguistic scholarship at Kazan was developing rapidly, both Baudouin and Kruszewski felt Kazan to be too remote and inhospitable. Shortly before he obtained docentship in Kazan, Kruszewski inquired in private about the possibility of docentship at Kyiv University, complaining that he and his family were so ill-suited for Kazan's climate that affording medicine for their constant sickness had become a significant financial burden; however, Kruszewski was not allowed to be employed at Kyiv because he was Catholic. Meanwhile, Baudouin went on sabbatical leave in the academic year of 1881–1882, during which traveled around the major centers of linguistics in western Europe. At the Paris Linguistic Society, Baudouin presented recent works by Kazan linguists, including Kruszewski's master's thesis. In Baudouin's absence, his teaching and administrative duties back in Kazan began to fall onto Kruszewski.

Facing the prospect of Baudouin's departure from Kazan, Kruszewski wrote his doctoral thesis over the academic year of 1882–1883 under time pressure. In May 1883, Kruszewski defended his doctoral thesis, An Outline of Linguistic Science, which earned him the position of ekstraordinarny professor. With Kruszewski's education complete, Baudouin left Kazan for the University of Dorpat (now Tartu), leaving Kruszewski to succeed him as chair of Indo-European at Kazan. In addition to Indo-European and Sanskrit, which he had already been teaching, Kruszewski also taught phonetics, comparative grammar of Romance languages, the history of French, Russian grammar, and general linguistics.

Illness and death

In 1884, Kruszewski's health began to decline, not publishing anything over the academic year of 1883–1884. In the spring of 1884, Kruszewski suffered a fever. This was followed by insomnia, memory loss, and tremors that rendered him unable to write. By the start of 1885, Kruszewski reported feeling suicidal and approaching insanity. Later in the year, Kruszewski was promoted to the rank of ordinarny professor, but he was unable to continue teaching. His illness further worsened, developing hallucinations and losses of consciousness. In February 1886, it became apparent that Kruszewski's illness was terminal, so he resigned his positions at the University of Kazan. He spent the remainder of his life at the mental hospital in Kazan, dying on November 12, 1887. He was buried at the Catholic cemetery in Kazan. Although Kruszewski had been initially diagnosed with neurasthenia (mental exhaustion) and treated with electro-shock therapy, his symptoms suggest that he was likely suffering from neurodegeneration caused by tertiary syphilis, which was frequently misdiagnosed for neurasthenia at the time.

Works

Kruszewski's major work was in the theory of alternations. He was one of the first to create a modern systematic approach to the phonological structure of language. Above all, Kruszewski was preoccupied with classifying the alternations and describing their status.

Kruszewski proposed three types of alternations and stressed the fact that each alternation is influenced by two important factors. The first factor involves the changes sounds undergo within themselves, while the second involves the conditions that stimulate a given change. Such an approach results in the classification of alternations into three major groups.

The first category of alternations is restricted to the sounds that are very similar. Alternations that belong to this category are governed by four rules:

• The cause of the alternation is determinate
• The alternation is general
• The alternation has no exceptions
• Alternations occur among sounds that do not differ markedly in phonetic properties.

An example of the first type are those variations between particular sounds in Russian as a function of the palatalization of the preceding consonant.

The alternations that represent the second and third categories are quite similar and there are three important conditions under which the alternations take place:

• The cause of the alternation may be absent
• The alternation may have exceptions
• Alternations occur among sounds that differ markedly in phonetic properties.

The sounds involved in alternations of the sounds of the second and the third category are known as correlatives. The only difference between the second and the third category is the degree to which a given category is morphologized. Kruszewski's example for the second category is u-umlaut in Icelandic. He does not strictly separate the second and the third category.

Personal life

Kruszewski married Julia née Hankiewicz in 1875, immediately after graduating from the University of Warsaw. Julia was well educated, knew Greek, interested in French and Polish literature, and would help with Kruszewski's academic tasks. The couple's first child, Wacława, was born in 1878 in Troitsk and baptized in Kazan, with Baudouin as her godfather. After Wacława, they had three more children: Stanisława in 1879, Marian Oskar in 1884, and Berta Justyna in 1885.

Selected bibliography

• Kruszewski, Mikołaj (1876). "Zagovory, kak vid russkoy narodnoy poezii" [Charms as a species of Russian folk poetry]. Varshavskie universitetskie izvestiya (3): 3–69.
• Kruszewski, Mikołaj (1879a). "Nablyudeniya nad nekotorymi foneticheskimi yavleniyami, svyazannymi s aktsentuatsiyey" [Observations on some phonetic phenomena related to accentuation]. Uchenyya Zapiski Imperatorskago Kazanskago Universiteta. 46 (1): 105–114.
• Kruszewski, Mikołaj (1879b). "Ob 'analogie' i 'narodnoy etimologii" [On 'analogy' and 'folk etymology']. Russky filologichesky vestnik. 2 (3): 109–122.
• Kruszewski, Mikołaj (1881). "K voprosu o gune. Issledovaniye v oblasti staroslavyanskogo vokalizma" [On the issue of guna: A study of Old Church Slavonic vocalism]. Russky filologichesky vestnik. 5 (1): 1–109.
• Kruszewski, Mikołaj (1883). "Ocherk nauki o yazyke" [An Outline of Linguistic Science]. Uchenyya Zapiski Imperatorskago Kazanskago Universiteta. 50 (1).

Translations

• Kruszewski, Mikołaj (1967). Wybór pism [Selected writings] (in Polish). Translated by Jerzy Kuryłowicz; Krystyna Pomorska. Wrocław-Warszawa-Kraków: Zakład narodowy im. Ossolińskich.
• Kruszewski, Mikołaj (1995). E. F. K. Koerner (ed.). Writings in general linguistics: On Sound Alternation (1881) and Outline of Linguistic Science (1883). Amsterdam Classics in Linguistics. Vol. 11. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. doi:10.1075/acil.11. ISBN 978-90-272-0977-1.

References

Sources

• Anderson, Stephen R. (2021). Phonology in the Twentieth Century: Second edition, revised and expanded. History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences. Vol. 5. Berlin: Language Science Press. doi:10.5281/zenodo.5509618. ISBN 978-3-96110-327-0. ISSN 2629-172X.
• Berezin, Fedor Mixajlovič (2001). "Mikołaj Kruszewski and 20th century linguistics". In E. F. K. Koerner; Aleksander J. Szwedek (eds.). Towards a History of Linguistics in Poland : From the Early Beginnings to the End of the Twentieth Century. Studies in the History of the Language Sciences. Vol. 102. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. pp. 209–231. ISBN 9781588111777.
• Jakobson, Roman (1971). "The Kazan School of Polish Linguistics and Its Place in International Development of Phonology". Selected Writings. Vol. II: Word and Language. The Hague: Mouton & Co. pp. 394–428.
• Koerner, E. F. K. (1995). "Mikołaj Kruszewski's Contribution to General Linguistics". In E. F. K. Koerner (ed.). Writings in General Linguistics: On Sound Alternation (1881) and Outline of Linguistic Science (1883). Amsterdam Classics in Linguistics. Vol. 11. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. pp. xi–xxxii. doi:10.1075/acil.11.intro. ISBN 978-90-272-0977-1.
• Pakholok, Zinaida (2019). "Research and promotion of Volyn linguist Mikolaj Kruszewski". Local Lore Studies (in Ukrainian) (4): 116–132. ISSN 2222-5250.
• Radwańska-Williams, Joanna (1993). A Paradigm Lost: The linguistic thought of Mikołaj Kruszewski. Studies in the History of the Language Sciences. Vol. 72. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John-Benjamins. ISBN 9789027276599.
• Radwańska-Williams, Joanna (2022). "The Kazan School: Jan Baudouin de Courtenay and Mikołaj Kruszewski". In Dresher, B. Elan; van der Hulst, Harry (eds.). The Oxford History of Phonology. Oxford University Press. pp. 179–202. doi:10.1093/oso/9780198796800.003.0009. ISBN 978-0-19-879680-0.